


Final Fantasy VII: Aerith and Tifa as contrasts and foils

by DeathByDatura



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: and definitely is not about shipping, literally zero shipping involved, this is NOT a fic, this is just me rambling about characters with a monocle and a bowtie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:41:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24008278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathByDatura/pseuds/DeathByDatura
Summary: A character study into two perpetually judged and misjudged characters and how much deeper their connection to their world is.
Kudos: 13





	Final Fantasy VII: Aerith and Tifa as contrasts and foils

**Author's Note:**

> honestly i'm doing this because i'm sick of people talking shit about Tifa and Aerith and pitting them against each other with the shallowest of reasonings.

The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII remains one of the most important pieces in video game history. Despite being a fairly simple story in terms of its Hero's Journey trope, the depths of its themes continue to be relevant to this day, and so do its characters. The iconic cast of Final Fantasy VII is well-known, but often the interpretations of their personalities and their relationships are ridiculously simplified, ignored, and misread. Of course, interpretation is subjective, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but it is fair to say this story and these characters didn't withstand the pass of time by being simple, but by being larger than life in their often dismissed depths.

One of this game's most iconic elements is the so-called love triangle between Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. These relationships have been subject to many an argument and continue to be so, but the simplification of these characters dismisses the greater symbolic involvement of their parts. The contrasting personalities of Tifa and Aerith have been exalted and villified for twenty-three years, but all has been done in regards to their relationships with Cloud. This overly simplistic read of these characters is, dare i say it, an insult to the grandiosity of not only their personalities, but what they represent both for Cloud and for the larger macrocosm of Final Fantasy VII, and the way in which their roles are, in fact, foils to each other and to the protagonist.

On the most superficial level their contrast is already evident. Tifa is represented by a dark color palette, with dark brown hair and deep red eyes and a simple, black and white outfit. The colors most often associated with her thorough the game are reds and yellows as evidenced by her gloves, boots, and the effects of her attacks. Aerith instead has ash brown colored hair and bright green eyes and wears a pink dress. Her theme colors are also pinks and pale greens. Even the outfits of each character are in a way representative of their personalities: while they were designed to subvert tropes, they work in accordance, wittingly or not, of the kind of person they are. Aerith's hands are bared, usually a trope for someone with nothing to hide, but at the same time she wears a long, demure dress, which could be played as symbolizing that, despite not hiding secrets, there's many obscure things to her. Meanwhile Tifa, a known secret keeper, keeps her hands covered with her fighting gloves, but her outfit is fairly revealing as if to say that she presents herself to the world as she is.

The foundation of their personalities also plays into this. Regardless of their lives' experiences, or perhaps precisely because of them, Aerith's extroverted character finds it easy to engage with others, while Tifa, being a clear introvert, despite being able to talk to others and empathize with them, doesn't express herself as brightly as Aerith does in front of others.

This forms the very foundation of the role they play in the universe of Final Fantasy VII. The visual presentation is enough to establish the link: Aerith and Tifa represent life and death. Two sides of the same coin. Antithesis forever hand in hand. Polar forces perpetually bound.

The most iconic visual of Aerith are the flowers, and indeed wherever she is nature thrives. In the original game the evidence was her house, but in Remake we get a clearer view of just what is the effect Aerith has on her surroundings. Her house stands in a lush scenery, the church she frequents is also a fertile area, and the entirety of the Sector 5 slums has a taste of greenery to them, something that's undoubtedly missing in other sectors and even above the plate. Aerith, as a symbol of life, represents restoration.

Meanwhile the landscapes surrounding Tifa are ever grim and arid. Nibelheim had been drained out of life because of the mako rector built on Mount Nibel, making the terrain sandy and barren, and the Sector 7 slums are just as arid, solely composed of debris. The fate of both her homes makes this even more obvious: Nibelheim was razed, burned to the ground, and all of its inhabitants either killed, including her father, or taken captive, and Sector 7, both slums and plate, were destroyed with many of its inhabitants dying with it. Thus Tifa, as a symbol of death, represents destruction.

Their relationships are evidence to this as well. While in Remake both of them are shown as being pillars of their respective communities, active in their work to improve the situation of their neighbors and alleviating the harshness of their circumstances, the heroines have two distinct focal points to their deepest links to them. Aerith's main connection to her community is the children. In every installment of the Compilation it is shown once and again that Aerith's focus is the children, and in Remake it is given greater importance in her interactions with them. Tifa, meanwhile, finds her strongest links in the mature. In the Compilation she is said to have been the favorite disciple of Zangan, a relatively elderly martial artist, and in Remake her main focal point is Marle, an elderly lady who takes her under her wing.

But perhaps the most relevant bond with life and death they share is through their very psyche, through what it makes them, what it transforms them into. Aerith is untouched by death by virtue of what she is. Despite death playing an important role in her life, it doesn't cause her sorrow and pain in the way it does most people. Despite having witnessed her mother's death, Aerith claims she's not sad because her mother returned to the planet. As a Cetra, she hears the voices of her people, long gone, but still present, feels the Lifestream. Even in death Aerith transcends it, fuses with the Lifestream and becomes something akin to a god-like entity. Tifa, on the contrary, is bound to death in a much more human, brutal, and crude way. When her mother died she fell into a catatonic condition, and, even more importantly in relation to this, death affected her so deeply she went in search of it. Tifa chased a suicidal wish to be reunited with her mother beyond the mountains and almost obtains it. She would later lose her father and fall into another near suicidal rage that almost kills her again, and after losing her hometown, she would lose her new home of Sector 7 and many a loved one there, demonstrating also her acute perception to the voices of the people suffering around her. Tifa touches the oblivion of death so closely she almost becomes it.

Even their fighting styles are testament to this: Aerith is a long-range combatant, keeping her distance from foes and with high magic stats, while Tifa fights at the closest range, with her fists, her body, in the crudest of ways. One remains far from the death and the blood and the pain, while the other stands face to face with them.

In all, these two heroines transcend being merely characters. Each of them are by definition the spirituality and mortality of human nature. One is the core of the planet, the Lifestream, the divine, while the other is its surface, Gaia itself, the grounded. Two realms that must always be connected, not as enemies or opposites, but as complements to one another, and this is a manifestation that Remake captures well.

These are their roles in the macrocosm of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, but how do they affect the smaller scale of things?

The role that immediately comes to mind is their relationship to the protagonist Cloud Strife. While regularly demoted to mere satellite love interests, Tifa and Aerith have a much larger impact in Cloud's life than merely forming a love triangle to which argue over. In truth Cloud could not be himself without either of them. As representatives of life and spirituality and death and mortality, these two characters play the role not only of contrasts to each other and the world around them, but also of foils to both each other and to Cloud.

Cloud's essence is that of an everyman, but he finds himself in a series of circumstances far larger than himself and which, at their inception, transform him down to his very psyche. Cloud's mind responds to that trauma by shutting his very own person down, burying it deep enough that he alone can't reach it. In its place a mental shield emerged: a new personality, someone who picked up traits of what he wanted to become, of a person he admired, of ideals he looked up to. Cloud rebuilt himself with the rags of his life and of who he used to be and the people he knew.

At this point Aerith and Tifa both recognize that Cloud isn't who he says. Upon meeting him, Aerith sees the shadow of another man she knew, another SOLDIER, but soon realizes that that isn't who Cloud is, that somewhere beneath that shadow lies his real self. Upon reuniting, in turn, Tifa realizes that Cloud is different, far too different to the one she remembers, and his story confirms her suspicions that something is amiss with Cloud. His life and his persona having been as twisted as it has though, how could either of the heroines retrieve his true self?

Cloud responds very differently to each of the heroines, and that response is the key to his true self. With Aerith he means to be cocky, cool, collected. He wants to be Zack, his admired hero and friend. It remains unknown if Cloud might be recalling stories told by Zack about women, or about a certain flower peddler he would visit, but the fact remains that while he played the role of someone he was not, Cloud would meet his match. Aerith's outward straightforwardness and playfulness and inward wisdom peel Cloud apart and hit him straight into his core. Cloud isn't cool, or collected, and by Aerith's hands he becomes vulnerable. Aerith can see beyond him, beyond his fake persona. After the self-deprecation, the non-consensual experimentation, the mako, the Jenova cells, the death of Zack, only someone of Aerith's spiritual perspicacity could hope to see past the pollution that obscures Cloud's true self, and so she does. Aerith plays the role of a guru and makes Cloud vulnerable, makes it possible for him to find the way back, to be restored to his real self. Except that Aerith doesn't know who this real self is.

Before Tifa Cloud doesn't allow himself to be vulnerable. In his mind, even through the haze of his trauma, remains the promise he made her to rescue her if she ever was in trouble. Thus, while Tifa realizes quickly that something is amiss when she reunites with Cloud in the Sector 7 slums station, and despite later finding that his story doesn't match her memory of the events, it is not within her power to restore him. Cloud is at this point buried too deep within himself to be reached by Tifa, someone who is, in a very humane way, hesitant to break that shell in fear of the consequences. It is only later, after the guru has peeled his layers apart, that Tifa can act. Tifa plays the role of a midwife, of a doula. Only after the illusion has broken can she deliver Cloud back to his real self, back to reality, back to his mortal, mundane persona and anchor him there through their shared memories. At that point, only those memories are tangible. The rest is Cloud's hideout. Tifa appeals to those memories once the layers of his fake persona have been torn aside by Aerith, searches through the debris of his destruction and delivers him. She helps him remember who he was, that insecure, lonely, cocky child who wanted to become a SOLDIER and impress a girl.

And so Cloud is reborn by the hands of the two heroines of Final Fantasy VII, so often belittled, misjudged, and insulted.

Given the functions both heroines play, it is undeserved to both their characters and unfair to the story itself to reduce them to fangirls or love interests. In a tale that has survived for twenty-three years as fresh as if it were new and resonated as much with the time of its launch as it does with the present, the oversimplification of its themes and its characters is a dishonor to the work put into its development.


End file.
